Fleeting Memories of the Past

For a moment, the two friends were chained to their spots by absolute horror. It was as if a sinister entity appeared in the computer screen and was now flowing out of it into the room. Whether through sheer willpower or through the fact that his address and family weren’t on the line, Andrew was the first to break free of this paralysis.

Deciding not to say anything yet out of fear that his voice would shake, crack, or give out completely, he instead reached for the nearby camera and microphone array to make sure they were unplugged. Having confirmed that they were, he turned them away from himself superstitiously, and despite the symbolic nature of this gesture, the evil presence began to slowly subside.

The computer mercilessly alleged that only thirty-seven seconds had passed. Finally, perhaps emboldened by his friend, Clement composed himself enough to be able to speak:

“I’ll have you know that I didn’t put myself in danger of getting hacked. No links, no downloads, and no accidental information slips.” His voice shook. He was surprised at how hoarse and foreign it sounded.

“Are you sure that’s even a fed? Don’t they act like political agitators, not cat lovers, these days?” Andrew said, skeptically.

“Beats me… maybe the attachments will reveal something?”

“But won’t that put us at a greater risk?”

“Whatever. This entire thing’s compromised anyways. No other way they could’ve gotten us.”

“You sure?” Andrew’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Throwing away such a good rig after so little time because of some hypothetical backdoor seemed like a stretch.

“Yeah. Gonna have to toss anything with a memory card. There goes my car fund.” Clement, increasingly more frustrated, kicked the wall behind the desk.

The attachments consisted of a picture of Clement’s house (fairly common addition to such messages), a convincing-looking letter from the federal police, mentioning a badge number 3864, and a picture of a masked man wearing the characteristic Canadian federal police uniform, holding the same letter and the badge 3864.

Despite it all, Andrew’s skepticism grew: “That looks fake as hell. Tell ‘em to get bent!”

“Patience. If these are actual feds they’ll piss off by themselves if we just don’t post the pictures. This hoax wasn’t that funny to begin with.” With these words, Clement sought to reassure himself as much as his friend.

Certainly reassured, but reassured of the wrong conclusion - that they were not in immediate danger - Andrew riled himself up even more: “And if they aren’t? Are we just gonna let some scammers ruin our fun?”

Clement, however, was having none of it: “If not, they’ll keep pressuring us. That’s when we get them. They make one mistake and they’re ours. Catch my drift?”

“I… guess.” He didn’t sound fully convinced, but recognized that it wasn’t his address and family that were on the line.

“Good. Let’s get this sorted out.” Clement reached back towards the keyboard and quickly inputted “We will comply,” then after a quick pause changed the “we” to an “I” as to not implicate anyone else. He turned to his friend as he hit SEND and addressed him more sternly:

“There. Let’s not speak of this again. I’ll call the RCP on Monday to make sure this was one of theirs.”

“It better be! The sucker’s gonna be facing five years if he isn’t!”

More confident, but still a little annoyed that his friend was, in fact, speaking of it again, Clement reminded him: “And we’ll be facing much worse consequences if we don’t clean this place in time.”

To his relief, Andrew got the hint: “You’re right. We’d better get started - Jean doesn’t mess around. I’ll go clean the first floor - if you don’t mind.” Without waiting for a reply, he lifted the fine mosquito net they had covered the staircase to the first floor with, and disappeared into the darkness below.

Silently, each of the friends worked on his designated floor. Clement certainly had quite a lot to be distracted from, so a mess that hadn’t been fully cleaned for decades was dispatched in a bit over an hour.

Still somewhat agitated from the ferocious struggle with years of litter, he looked around in awe. From a cramped, dusty cave more suitable to be called a storage room, the observatory was transformed to a real mad scientist’s lair. His gaze ran across the marriage of old and new: colourful, 3D-printed camera rig attached to a beat-up old telescope with flaking paint, top-of-the-line gaming PC atop an ancient oak desk, and a poster with the Curiosity rover reimagined as a moe anime girl next to star charts from the previous century. He briefly locked eyes with this smiling “rover” and smiled back - though this poster’s presence was jarring to the uninformed, to him it was the crown jewel of his second home for the past four years.

Next, his attention shifted to the floor, and here too a welcome surprise awaited him. The hardwood floor - now decluttered save a few boxes and trash bags - was cleaner than he expected. So much cleaner, in fact, that he probably wouldn’t even have to wash it - a few passes of his parents’ miniature vacuum cleaner he had intended for the dusty shelves would do the trick.

As his unhappy thoughts and concerning conclusions were rapidly returning, he got straight to vacuuming the elaborate semicircular shelf that held the archive he had just gathered. With every pass of the tiny apparatus it felt as if past grievances were being removed along with the dust and grime. About time, he reasoned, they had gone through much in the last four years but were ensuring that the next generation of astronomers would not.

Before long, these noble justifications for the task at hand had all but overpowered the previous gloomy ones. After all, they hadn’t been doing anything illegal - the sky wasn’t a top secret military compound. Even if this was something the government didn’t want getting out - a secret probe or a new world-ending toy of theirs - he had complied by not posting about it, and thus had nothing to fear. Now that this was out of the way, though, the second-order implications began to vex him: why would the government want to cover up an object moving at the Earth in the first place?

He tried his best to push these thoughts aside and switched to vacuuming the floor absentmindedly until his tool hit a small box at the foot of the circular wall. This was the control panel for the rotating dome that allowed the telescope to move across all 360 degrees of the sky without exposing the rest of the observatory to the elements.

It would have been a trivial task to rotate it into position now by inputting the bearing calculated last night as the comet’s brightest point, but Clement instead hit the button hand-labelled CLOSE, prompting the narrow vertical shutter to start closing. He would demonstrate this digital control panel to the guests, he thought, to impress them with his engineering skills.

A little later, all but done, he took a final look at the observatory and was quite satisfied with what he saw. Taking a trash bag in each hand, he headed towards the winding staircase.

The first floor also consisted of just one room, but it appeared even more confined thanks to the gigantic table in the middle. This was a relic of older times - specially ordered to accommodate up to fifteen members of the club - the better half of which now stood collecting dust. Around it were a few more shelves containing awards, telescope lenses, samples of rock from other celestial bodies, and the club’s specially made tea and dining set of fine china. The main object of interest on the wall was an inactivated carbine, but its surroundings were just as impressive - star charts, photos, newspaper clippings and old calendars with pictures too pretty to throw out. Among the calendars, particularly beautiful were the Moon of June 1983, Venus of February 2004, and Jupiter of December 2017. Judging by the recency of many awards and congratulatory certificates, the current roster made up for in merit what they lacked in numbers and were set to make a very meaningful contribution to the club’s long and distinguished history. Though the two curved windows let in a lot of light, it was not nearly as intense and blinding as the Sun’s assault Clement had withstood on the top floor.

It was in the midst of this scene that he found Andrew sitting absentmindedly at the large meeting table, immersed in a textual conversation with someone on the other side of his phone. He cleared his throat and prepared for a rather uncomfortable conversation.